From blair at orcaware.com  Tue Nov  5 19:50:32 2002
From: blair at orcaware.com (Blair Zajac)
Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2002 19:50:32 -0800
Subject: [Orca-announce] Last Orca email through Yahoo!
Message-ID: <3DC89188.E049E367@orcaware.com>

This is the last email to the Orca mailing lists using Yahoo!'s email
servers.  All further Orca messages should be sent to the appropriate
mailing list hosted on orcaware.com.  I'm using the Mailman mailing
list system to host these mailing lists.

I have turned off the ability to subscribe to and send messages to the
Yahoo! Orca groups.

1) Why is this happening?

   a) No more advertising in email messages.

   b) Surfing the web archive does not show any advertising and
      doesn't have that annoying "click here" to see the real message.

2) What are the new email addresses?

   Here's the mapping between the old and new mailing list addresses:

     orca-announce at yahoogroups.com     orca-announce at orcaware.com
     orca-developers at yahoogroups.com   orca-dev at orcaware.com
     orca-discuss at yahoogroups.com      orca-users at orcaware.com
     orca-users at yahoogroups.com        orca-users at orcaware.com

   Note that orca-discuss and orca-users are being merged into
   orca-users.

3) Welcome email & new password

   You should be receiving an email soon from OrcaWare welcoming you
   to the OrcaWare mailing list along with a password.

4) Managing your Orca subscription

   Your email address and this password let you manage your
   subscription via the web.  The URLs for managing your subscription
   are:

      orca-announce http://www.orcaware.com/mailman/listinfo/orca-announce
      orca-dev      http://www.orcaware.com/mailman/listinfo/orca-dev
      orca-users    http://www.orcaware.com/mailman/listinfo/orca-users

   Go to the bottom of the web page, enter your email address, then
   click on "Edit Options".

5) New Orca code checkin mailing list

   There is also a new mailing list orca-checkins at orcaware.com which
   is a publicly accessible, read-only list which is used to
   disseminate version control check-in messages made by the Orca
   maintainers to the Orca developer community.  You can subscribe to
   this list by going to

     http://www.orcaware.com/mailman/listinfo/orca-checkins

6) Script to rearchive messages for mailman

   <off-topic>

   I wrote a pretty complicated Perl script to process all of my mail
   box folders and pull out and process email messages that were sent
   to one of the Orca mailing lists.  I did this to put together a
   nice archive version of all the Orca messages so it can be easily
   browsable.

   I'm pretty proud of it and it took a lot of work in writing it.
   Contact me fore a copy of it.  I'll put it up shortly on my
   Subversion server.

   The script is designed to process both Inbox and Sent style mail
   boxes.

   This script can do the following things:

   a) Read any number of input mail box files.

   b) Copy messages in the input mail box files to one or more output
      mail box folders using any number of regular expressions that
      are checked against the To, Cc and Bcc headers to decide if and
      which output folder to copy the message to.

   c) Delete the Bcc's in the messages in the output mail folders
      because they wouldn't be seen by any receiving parties.

   d) To make browsing the Mailman archive easier, convert any
      text/html messages to text/plain.

   e) Remove most Yahoo! advertising added to the bottom of the
      text/html or text/plain messages.

   f) remove text/html message parts when the message type is
      multipart/alternative and a text/plain part exists.

   g) remove message parts whose Content-Type matches regular
      expressions.  I used this to remove my Vcard attachments from
      the archive.

  </off-topic>

Regards,
Blair

-- 
Blair Zajac <blair at orcaware.com>
Web and OS performance plots - http://www.orcaware.com/orca/


From bbellina at nd.edu  Fri Nov  8 10:39:00 2002
From: bbellina at nd.edu (Brendan Bellina)
Date: Fri Nov  8 10:39:00 2002
Subject: [Orca-announce] Look - LDAP stats collector for Orca - beta 0.90 release announcement
Message-ID: <3DCC0320.2060204@nd.edu>

An announcement for Orca users who wish to collect performance 
statistics from an LDAP directory such as iPlanet Directory Server or 
OpenLDAP.

Developed at the University of Notre Dame with funding from the 
Internet-2 organization (<http://www.internet2.edu>), Look - the LDAP 
operational Orca "k"ollector, is now available as a beta release v0.90 
at <http://www.nd.edu/~bbellina/downloads/Look>.  Look is a Perl script 
which is capable of collecting performance statistics from an iPlanet 
Directory Server 4.x log file and by direct LDAP query and producing 
output files which can be processed by the Orca 
(<http://www.orcaware.com>) product. Production release 1.0 is expected 
to be part of the NMI-Release in the spring of 2003.

Near-real-time graphs (generated at 15 minute intervals) produced by 
Orca based on data collected by Look can be viewed online at 
<http://www.nd.edu/~eds/perfmon/Look>.

Questions about Look can be directed to bbellina at nd.edu.

-- 
   ______________________________________________________________

   Brendan Bellina
   Office of Information Technologies
   University of Notre Dame du Lac
   mailto:bbellina at nd.edu
   574-631-8575  316 Information Technology Center  Notre Dame, IN 46556
   vCard: <http://www3.nd.edu/~eds/cgi-bin/ldapvcard.pl?uid=bbellina>
   ______________________________________________________________



From blair at orcaware.com  Thu Nov 14 19:29:01 2002
From: blair at orcaware.com (Blair Zajac)
Date: Thu Nov 14 19:29:01 2002
Subject: [Orca-announce] Orca 0.27 released
Message-ID: <3DD468F9.11238BBB@orcaware.com>

The long awaited release for Orca 0.27 is finally over!

The direct download URL is

    http://www.orcaware.com/orca/pub/orca-0.27.tar.gz

Below are the significant changes made since Orca 0.26, which
was the last production Orca release from March 10, 2000.

Enjoy.

Best,
Blair


NEW IN ORCA 0.27
================

 Released November 14, 2002.

 1) In orcallator.cfg:
    Add support for Znyz Network's 100 Mbit interfaces known by the
      znb device name.
    Fix a typo in matching on the dmfe 100 Mbit interface statistics.

 2) In orcallator/orcallator_running.pl.in:
    Have it work with the new orcallator-YYYY-MM-DD and
      orcallator-YYYY-MM-DD.XXX style file names.
    Warn if the orcallator or percol file is newer than the current
      time.

 3) In orca_services:
    Complete the rename from orcaservices to orca_services by changing
    any references to orcaservices to orca_servers in the files
    themselves.  The file names were properly renamed previously, but
    not all of the file contents were.


NEW IN ORCA 0.27b3
==================

 Released November 7, 2002.

 1) Now require Perl version 5.005_03 instead of 5.004_01.  Perl
    versions older than this are very broken and cannot even load
    Orca.  Additionally, CPAN modules are now requiring newer Perl
    features which the older ones do not support.

 2) In Orca's configuration file, instead of defaulting to LINE1 for
    any data parameters appearing in a plot configuration that does
    not have its line_type specified, use the last set line_type set
    in that plot.  If no line_type's are set in a plot, then use LINE1
    as the default for all data's in that plot.

 3) Rename any orcaservices file and directory names to orca_services
    to make the name easier to read.

 4) Include and require rrdtool 1.0.40, Digest::MD5 2.20 and Storable
    2.05.  Include TimeDate 1.14 and Time::HiRes 1.38.

 5) All of the Orca mailing lists have moved off of Yahoo! Groups and
    are now hosted on orcaware.com using the Mailman mailing list
    software.  See http://devel.orcaware.com/orca/mailing_lists.html
    or http://www.orcaware.com/mailman/listinfo for more information.

The following changes are what's new in orcallator.se 1.35 and the
orcallator.cfg file since version 1.28 which was included with Orca
0.27b2.  Most of the changes below are taken advantage of in the
included orcallator.cfg and start_orcallator files.

 4) Instead of naming the output files percol-*, name them
    orcallator-*.

 5) Output eleven new columns named state_* where each column
    represents numerically the state of one of the system's substates
    as they appear in the DNnsrkcmdit output.  The character * is
    replaced with the same character that appears in the DNnsrkcmdit
    string to represent the particular subsystem.  This can be used to
    create a single plot that shows how all of the subsystems are
    performing.  The mapping between successive states is exponential,
    so that as the subsystems get in worse conditions, the plots will
    show higher values.  Patch contributed by Rusty Carruth
    <rcarruth at tempe.tt.slb.com>.  Make all of the live_rule.se live
    and temporary variable names consistent.

 6) In orcallator.se, SE 3.2.1 stat.se, mknod is a C-preprocessor
    define to _xmknod on x86 systems while on SPARC systems stat.se
    declares mknod as a normal function.  When stat.se is included
    before kstat.se on x86 systems the mknod define causes a compile
    error on kstat's mknod variables which are part of the
    ks_rfs_proc_v3 and ks_rfs_req_v3 structures.  The work around is
    to include kstat.se before stat.se.

 7) In orcallator.se, changed method used by raw_disk_map to detect
    the end of GLOBAL_disk_info to looking for the first short disk
    name.  This works for SCSI disks and looking for fd or st devices
    whichshould work for EIDE devices.  Patch contributed by Alan
    LeGrand <alegrand at wallace.com>.

 8) In orcallator.se, always define USE_RAWDISK to use the new raw
    disk code.  Previously, USE_RAWDISK was defined only if WATCH_OS
    was defined, but if WATCH_DISK was defined and WATCH_OS was not,
    then the new raw disk code was not being used.  This change makes
    the behavior consistent.

 9) In orcallator.se, fix a problem where the web access log file
    pointer instead of the file descriptor was being passed to
    fstat().  Fix a problem where the cached web access log stat()
    information wasn't being erased if the log file was successfully
    stat()ed but then fopen() failed.  Problem noted by Jeremy McCarty
    <jeremy at nd.edu>.

10) In orcallator.se, in check_output_log_filename(), stat() was was
    being passed a stat_t by value, instead of a pointer to a stat_t.
    Only the return value from stat() was being used, so this bug had
    no effect upon the logic of the code.  Problem noted by Richard
    Pettit <richp at setoolkit.com>.

11) In orcallator.se, add support for SE version 3.3.  Break
    compatibility with SE version 3.1, which was released in April
    1999, and older SE versions.  Solaris 8 removed the pagesio
    variable and in SE 3.3, kstat.se #ifdef's out ks_system_pages's
    pagesio variable on Solaris 8 and above, so now orcallator.se only
    measures pagesio on Solaris 7 or older.  Even with older versions
    of SE and orcallator.se which defined and used pagesio on Solaris
    8, pagesio would always measure as 0.  SE 3.3 finally removed the
    compatibility #define from prpsinfo_t to psinfo_t, so now use
    psinfo_t.  This breaks compatibility with SE 3.1 and older SE
    versions.

12) In orcallator.se, add a new measurement, the number of secure web
    server processes on the system using the column name #httpsds.  If
    the environmental variable WEB_SERVER_SECURE is defined, use its
    value as the regular expression to match on process names.  If
    WEB_SERVER_SECURE is not defined, then count the number of
    httpsd's.  New variable www_server_secure_proc_name to hold the
    regular expression.  Increase the maximum number of disks that can
    be monitored using the RAWDISK code from 512 to 1024 by increasing
    MAX_RAWDISKS from 512 to 1024.  Reformat and modify the usage
    message to fit the new WEB_SERVER_SECURE environmental variable.


NEW IN ORCA 0.27b2
==================

 Released October 2, 2001.

 1) Orca has a new home page:

      http://www.orcaware.com/

    All of the links in Orca, orcallator.se and the orcallator.se
    configuration file have been updated to point to the new web site.

 2) To allow input data files to represent that a measurement is not
    available or could not be measured, the letter 'U' can be placed
    where the numerical data would normally appear.  This is better
    than storing an out-of-range value in the input data files.  The
    'U' is passed to RRDtool which properly handles this unknown
    value.

 3) Fix a bug where Orca would leave around many defunct bunzip2,
    gunzip or uncompress processes when reading compressed input
    data files using a separate process to pipe in the uncompressed
    data.  Orca now closes the pipe when the end of file has been
    reached allowing the system to reap the defunct processes.

 4) Include and require Digest::MD5 2.16 and Storable 1.0.13.

The following changes are what's new in orcallator.se 1.28 and the
orcallator.cfg file since version 1.23 which was included with Orca
0.26.  All of the changes below are taken advantage of in the included
orcallator.cfg and start_orcallator files.

 5) In orcallator.cfg.in, the Disk Run Percent plots also match for
    disk_runp_sd\d+ in addition to disk_runp_md\d+.

 6) In orcallator.se, change the output log filename format from
    percol-%Y-%m-%d to percol-%Y-%m-%d-XXX, where XXX is a number
    starting at 0 that is incremented anytime the number of output
    columns changes or type of data stored in a column changes.  This
    is in addition to the creation of a new log filename when a new
    day starts.  Whenever the program needs to create a new log file
    for any reason, it will search for the smallest XXX so that there
    are no log files named percol-%Y-%m-%d-XXX{,.Z,.gz,.bz2}.  If the
    COMPRESSOR environmental is set and any uncompressed files are
    found while looking for the smallest XXX, they are compressed with
    the COMPRESSOR command.  orcallator.cfg.in's find_files has been
    updated to find the new log filenames generated by orcallator.se
    1.28.

 7) In orcallator.se, instead of outputting the number of CPUs only
    when WATCH_MUTEX is defined, output it when either WATCH_CPU or
    WATCH_MUTEX is defined.  Only declare and update tmp_mutex if
    WATCH_MUTEX defined.

 8) In orcallator.se, add three parameters that vmstat outputs to the
    output files that orcallator.se generates, #runque, vmstat's `r'
    column, which is the number of processes in the run queue waiting
    to run on a CPU, #waiting, vmstat's `b' column, which is the
    number of processes blocked for resourceses (I/O, paging), and
    #swpque, vmstat's `w', the number of proceses runnable but swapped
    out.  In orcallator.cfg.in add a new plot titled "Processes in Run
    Queue/Waiting/Swapped" to plot the new measurements.

 9) In orcallator.se, check [wr]lentime to see if an EMC is using a
    fake disk for control.  EMC disks have a fake disk which commands
    are run over to configure the disk array or to get stats from;
    they are not real data transfers. They cause 1000 MB/sec writes to
    appear in the stats.  I still get them but not as often with this
    bit of code in.  If the I/O which occurred in the last five
    minutes is not greater than 1/100sec then it is not a very valid
    stat anyway.  What hapens is that we can have a small I/O, say
    1024 bytes, in a 1/100sec = 1024*100/sec.  Make sure to define
    HAVE_EMC_DISK_CONTROL to enable this check.  Patch contributed by
    Damon Atkins <Damon.Atkins at nabaus.com.au>.

10) In orcallator.se, increase MAX_COLUMNS from 512 to 2048.


NEW IN ORCA 0.27b1
==================

 Released May 10, 2001.

 1) By default, now create an hourly plot that shows the last 1.5
    hours of data.  Add a global "generate_hourly_plot" configuration
    file parameter that when set to 0 turns this plot off.  Hourly
    plot creation is disabled in orcallator.cfg.in since orcallator.se
    by default measures the system every 5 minutes and the plots look
    blocky.

 2) Fix the warning message in src/orca.pl.in

      Use on uninitialized value in array element at (eval X) line 1,
      <DATA> line Y

    when Orca was run with Perl 5.6.0.  This bug was in the filename
    sorting subroutine.

    This problem is probably responsible for problems where there are
    missing data from generated plots.  Since the filename sorting
    subroutine tells Orca the order in which to load data into the RRD
    files and the sorted filename list will have newer data files
    listed before older data files, once newer data is entered into an
    RRD file you cannot add older data, resulting in missing data in
    the output plots.

    If this is a problem, then the solution is to remove the RRD files
    and rerun Orca with all of the input data files.

 3) Add a new command line option named -no-images which suppresses
    image generation.  Remove the command line option -r which told
    Orca to only update the RRD files and not generate HTML and image
    files.  To replace -r functionality, use both -no-images and
    -no-html command line options.

 4) Add a new command line option -no-html to instruct Orca to skip
    generating HTML files.  Patch from Alex Howansky
    <alex at wankwood.com>.

 5) Add a new command line option -logfile that specifies a filename
    that STDOUT and STDERR are redirected to so that all messages,
    warnings and errors are printed to the file.  Now when a SIGPIPE
    is caught, messages will continue to be printed unless -logfile
    was not given to Orca.  Patch supplied by Bruce Johnson
    <Bruce.Johnson at PictureVision.com>.

 6) Add a new command line option -daemon that puts Orca in the
    background or daemonizes it.  It is recommended that when this
    command line option is used that -logfile is used.  Patch supplied
    by Bruce Johnson <Bruce.Johnson at PictureVision.com>.

 7) A new contrib directory has been created which is where
    contributed scripts and programs will be kept.  The first
    submissions are:

    a) Include the orca_services (was originally named orcaservices
       but this is too hard to read) package in the contrib directory
       which was written by Carlos Canau <Carlos.Canau at KPNQwest.pt>
       and documented by Jose Carlos <jcp at KPNQwest.pt>.  This package
       allows monitoring of many different types of Unix services,
       such as DNS, SMTP, POP, etc.

    b) A script to rotate Orca's HTML directory so that the daily
       plots can be archived.  It is named rotate_orca_graphs.

 8) Replace the small color scheme used for automatically cycling
    through plot colors with a longer list designed by Guy Dallaire
    <gdallair-nospam at criq.qc.ca>.

 9) To support configurations where it does not make sense to make all
    of the hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly
    plots, i.e.  when only one measurement per day is made and having
    a daily plot would not show anything, Orca now understands the
    global configuration file options "generate_hourly_plot",
    "generate_daily_plot", "generate_weekly_plot",
    "generate_monthly_plot", "generate_quarterly_plot", and
    "generate_yearly_plot".  When an argument value of 0 is given to
    the parameter, the plot is not created.  If the particular
    parameter is not used or the value is not 0, then the plot is
    created.

10) Add a new configuration file option for plots named
    "summary_format" which specifies the format for the summary values
    as passed to the RRDtool GPRINT function.  The same format is used
    for each number within a single summary line, but you can specify
    multiple "summary_format"'s options if there are multiple plots on
    the graph.  The default value, which has not changed from previous
    Orca versions, is '%9.3lf %S'.  Patch from Alex Howansky
    <alex at wankwood.com>.

11) Remove the "date_format" configuration option as it was never
    supported.  This is replaced by a new "date_parse" configuration
    file parameter which supports converting arbitrary strings in the
    input source data files that somehow represent time into an Unix
    epoch time usable by Orca.  The "date_parse" parameter appears in
    a group field and is an arbitrary Perl subroutine that is given
    two arguments, the first being the name of the file where the data
    is loaded and the second the string from the "date_source" column
    that contains some time information.  The subroutine should return
    the Unix epoch time.  If this option is not specified, then Orca
    assumes that the string holds the Unix epoch time.

    This Perl subroutine is only used if the file's date source is not
    specified to be the file's last modified time as indicated to Orca
    by use of the "date_source" file_mtime configuration file option.

12) Remove the "sub_dir" configuration file parameter and now always
    create sub directories for RRD, image and HTML files.  This
    removes the problem when a simple Orca configuration file was used
    and Orca did not create subdirectories and then additional groups
    where added to the configuration file Orca would begin to use
    subdirectories and the existing RRD, image and HTML files would be
    in the wrong location.  In this case, Orca would reload all of the
    input data.

13) Allow the "late_interval" configuration parameter to appear in a
    configuration file group.  If it does not appear in a group
    listing, then use the global "late_interval" value.

14) Add a new configuration file option named "require" that allows
    the configuration file to specify the minimum required version of
    Orca.

15) Orca now catches SIGPIPEs so the lock directory is properly
    removed when Orca's STDOUT and/or STDERR is piped to a process,
    such as less, and the piped to process exits before Orca does.

16) Fix a bug where Orca's documentation stated that the configuration
    file can specify different data_min, data_max, and data_type's for
    each data in a plot but the code did not.  Make the modifications
    in Orca to support this feature.

17) When loading a configuration file, now do a complete check of it
    for errors before quitting, instead of quitting after a single
    error.

18) Include and require the following package updates: Digest::MD5
    2.13, RRDtool 1.0.33 and Storable 1.0.11.

19) I have a new email address, blair at orcaware.com.

The following changes are what's new in orcallator.se 1.28 and the
orcallator.cfg file since version 1.23 which was included with Orca
0.26.  All of the changes below are taken advantage of in the included
orcallator.cfg and start_orcallator files.

20) When orcallator.se was running on a system with an older version
    of SE the p_vmstat.scan variable is an integer and the sprintf to
    %8.3f fails, resulting in a perceived scan rate of 0 pages per
    second.  Now always add 0.0 to p_vmstat.scan to get a double.

21) Fix a typo where nil was misspelled as nik.

22) Make sure to check the return from stat() on the web server access
    log in case the file is missing.  Use fstat() instead of stat()
    when a file descriptor is available.

23) Print the portion of time running in idle mode with some process
    waiting for block I/O as wio% and otherwise completely idle time
    as idle%.  Update orcallator.cfg.in to fix a bug in plotting the
    CPU usage plots where the idle% time was calculated by subtracting
    the user percent time usr% and the system percent time sys% from
    100%.  This did not take into account the wait on IO time wio%
    that the system measures and hence the idle% was overestimated.
    Now plot the correct idle% and the wio%.

24) Recoded measure_disk() to access the RAWDISK interface to
    sys_kstat device information to allow the activity on Sun's A1000
    and Clariion Raid controller drives to be seen.  Apparently the
    pseudo drivers do not update the kstat interface.  It is also
    inverts the fix provided by version 1.23 to avoid over-counting md
    devices.  By suppressing stats from slices and metadevices and
    instead reporting on full devices such as c0t0d0 or sd0.  Note:
    This may have introduced an interaction with the live_rules.se
    class monitoring of drive performance.  Prevent floppy disks and
    tape drives from RAWDISK.  Added wio% to measure wait time since
    the idle calculation is wrong without this.  Prevent filesystems
    mounted under /snapshots from being seen.  Patch contributed by
    Alan LeGrand <alegrand at wallace.com>.